


Brethren in the Ashes of Sentiment

by canolacrush



Series: Intermezzo [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, M/M, Men Who Stare Longingly at Empty Chairs, Open to Interpretation, Pining, Pining Sherlock, Post-The Sign of Three, Pre-His Last Vow, Thank You Cards, why am I not surprised Pining Sherlock has its own tag?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-07
Updated: 2014-04-07
Packaged: 2018-01-18 12:05:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1427833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canolacrush/pseuds/canolacrush
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Aren’t you going to read it?” Mrs. Hudson asks.</p>
<p>“No, you’ve already told me what’s in it,” Sherlock replies.  “Thank you for coming to the wedding, thank you for the gift, a magical experience that will live in our hearts forever, so glad you could share it with us, special day, fantastic trip, love, thanks, etc.  Boring.  I’ve seen it all before.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brethren in the Ashes of Sentiment

**Author's Note:**

> Loosely inspired by looking through Thank You cards I've received from different weddings I've attended (I collect them) and noticing that in the one my best friend sent me, she amusingly enough made the same error that you'll see in the course of this fic.

_Two weeks.  Two weeks.  Two weeks two weeks two weeks.  Two weeks since the wedding.  Two weeks.  Thirteen days fourteen hours eleven minutes and six-seven-eight-nine-ten-eleven seconds._

_No, two weeks is long enough.  Time to move the chair._

Springing from his own chair, Sherlock advances on John’s chair with a gleam in his eyes commonly seen in children about to destroy their sibling’s beloved sand castle.  It’s fixated and single-minded, with all lovely thoughts of ocean, sand crabs, seagulls, and ice lollies obliterated in favour of _I want it **crumbled**_.

He shoves the chair mightily with one foot and hears the screech of wood-against-wood.  He ponders if he can push the chair out the window, if it would fit through the frame.

_Funereal behaviour_ , comments the Mycroft in his head.

Sherlock goes around the chair and starts dragging it by its back into the kitchen, the transition from wood to tile still loud except now it sounds like a different voice has suddenly started screaming.

_You remember Aunt Margaret_ , Mycroft continues.  _When dear Uncle Eustace passed away.  She got rid of everything, too.  Couldn’t bear to be reminded._

“Shut up,” Sherlock hisses, pulling the chair past the kitchen table.

_I warned you, Sherlock, not to get involved_ , Mycroft adds, glancing idly at his nails.

“I’m not involved,” Sherlock mutters under his breath, pausing by the refrigerator.  “It’s been two weeks.  If he wanted the chair, he would’ve come for it by now.  Besides,” he adds, squeezing the chair down the narrow hallway.  “It was mine to begin with, I can do whatever I like with it.  It’s taking up space.”

_We both know that’s not quite true_ , sing-songs a voice from the back of his mind, the opinion he ignores as often as possible.

Getting it through the door is another struggle, and he has to go around through the bath to the front again to forcefully push the chair through the frame.  Something makes a dangerous cracking noise, and for a second his heart stops, irrationally fearing he’s broken the chair he’s trying to get rid of.  But no, the damnable thing is solid and stubborn as a rock; it’s just the doorframe splintering.  Sherlock sighs and shoves the chair through the rest of the way.

He now has the stupid thing in his room.  He looks at the window.  A full-grown woman and an American has fit through this window.  A chair shouldn’t be that difficult.  He can break it apart beforehand if he has to.  He positions it in front the glass pane.

“Oh!  Sherlock, dear, what are you doing?” Mrs. Hudson asks from the kitchen.

“Redecorating,” Sherlock replies, waving to the chair.

“So that’s what all that noise was about,” she comments, then notices the chair.  “Isn’t that John’s chair?”

“It’s _my_ chair,” Sherlock retorts, hands on his hips.  He glares at her, daring her to contradict him.

She doesn’t.  Instead she holds up a stamped envelope.  “Well, I was just bringing up the post.  We got Thank You cards from John and Mary!”

She barely says the word “John” before the card is snatched out of her hand as Sherlock passes by.  He sniffs the envelope as he enters the living room.  She goes on to say, “It sounds like they had a lovely time on their honeymoon.”

He makes a noncommittal noise and sits heavily in his chair, then puts the card aside and picks up a book instead, flipping it open and staring down at the pages.

“Aren’t you going to read it?” she asks.

“No, you’ve already told me what’s in it,” Sherlock replies.  “Thank you for coming to the wedding, thank you for the gift, a magical experience that will live in our hearts forever, so glad you could share it with us, special day, fantastic trip, love, thanks, etc.  Boring.  I’ve seen it all before.”  He waves her away.  “You’ve got things to do.  Leave.”

“You should at least open it,” she says with a bit of a laugh.

He pointedly turns a page in the book.

“Well then, I’ll leave you to your redecorating…or whatever it is that you’re up to,” she says, then finally—mercifully—leaves, one careful step down at a time.

As soon as she’s safely downstairs, he picks up the envelope again and scrutinizes it.  The envelope still smells a bit like Mary—Claire de la Lune, her perfume—and the address is written in her neat, tidy handwriting, so different from John’s doctor-scrawl.  Unsurprising, expected—wives are usually the ones in charge of this sort of thing, the letter-writing.  The stamp is slightly coiling at one edge—licked multiple times—again, to be expected, she probably put on all the stamps at once before mailing them off, difficult to retain saliva over sustained licking of adhesive paper.

He digs a finger into the corner of the sealed, folded seam of the envelope, then sharply drags his finger down and rips the covering open.  The card appals him as soon as he sees it.  It has a grey tabby in a top hat and a ginger tabby in a bridal veil on the front.  He considers pitching it into the fire to join its brethren in the ashes of sentiment—horsehair, rosin, flecks of gold paint from an ill-fated cat figurine.

Instead, he shuts his eyes, sighs in a vexed manner through his nose, then opens his eyes and the card all at once.

_Dear Sherlock_ , it begins, in Mary’s neat handwriting.  He wasn’t expecting anything different. 

_We were surprised you left so early!  John and I were disappointed we didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to you before the honeymoon._   Why would they be?  They’d seen enough of him at the wedding.  It’s not like he hadn’t been right next to them since the beginning.  What was there to be said?  He’d sent them off with a waltz, a vow, and a diagnosis of pregnancy—that was surely enough.  It’s not like he had no idea they’d be leaving for nine days to go on a sex holiday.  They would have a lovely trip with or without him telling them to do so.

_We had a lovely time_ … He skips over the next two sentences.  Because of course they had a lovely time on the sex holiday.  That’s what sex holidays are _for._

_Both John and I would like to thank you for all you’ve done for us.  We love the waltz—not many couples can say they had a song written for them, and it was such a lovely, special touch to ~~your~~ our wedding day._   He frowns at the scribbled-out word.  Clearly, it was once a “your”—the scribble extends downwards quite a ways on the first letter, and he can just make out an “o” and an “r” beneath the ink-hatched mass.  The intended “our” hovers in smaller print above the error.

_Your speech was beautiful, too, and I know I speak for John as well when I say we’ll both remember it for years to come._   His frown deepens.  She’s being polite about it, even though the speech clearly hadn’t had the effect he’d intended.  However, Thank You cards generally _are_ supposed to be polite.  It’s expected.

_And of course, thank you for all your help with the wedding planning and for being the hero of the day—we couldn’t have pulled it off without you!  We owe you one when it’s your turn to step up to the altar._   He can practically _hear_ the winking emoticon she’d mercifully refrained from putting at the end of the sentence.  God, _spare him_ from the inane humour of the romantically-minded.

_Love Always,_

_John and Mary_

He stares at the signature.  Just one word, _John_ , in that nearly illegible chicken-scratch John calls penmanship, just that one word, scrawled distractedly, hurriedly, likely repeated over and over as he went through the stack of a hundred or so cards, trying to get it over with, one after the other, _John, John, John, John, John_ …

Sherlock closes the card and faces the two married kittens once again.  He looks up to the empty space where John’s chair used to be—the space that yawns into the kitchen, into the hallway and past the damaged doorframe, a space that stretches all the way from the front windows of Baker Street to where Sherlock’s first bedroom window is, where the chair awaits its fate like a traitor set to walk the plank.

Two weeks.

One small word.

It would be easy.  It would be _so_ easy, to tip that chair out the window and never see it again.

_Be done with it_ , Mycroft advises from the corner of his mind.

He drops the card on top of the book and marches to his bedroom, staring at the old, worn chair that gathered dust for two years while he was away, the chair he’s dragged with him since before even Montague Street, the chair that by all rights _belongs_ to him.  If John had ever wanted the chair, he could have taken it with him when he moved out after Sherlock jumped.  He could’ve collected it before the wedding.  He could’ve come back for it.  He didn’t.

Sherlock realises he’s frozen next to the splintered doorframe.

It was just one word. 

_One word shouldn’t cause this much…_

Inhaling sharply, Sherlock finds the door handle and slams the door shut, the abused frame struggling to hold it in place.  He turns his back on the door and stalks into the living room, eyeing the Thank You card like it’s a stink bomb about to go off. 

He picks up the card, then glances to the fire.  He makes an aborted move to throw it in.  But at the last second, he instead picks up the book he’s been reading and marks his place with the card.

He never opens the book again.


End file.
